Cures for Heartbreak

by Margo Rabb

  Then, the day of the wedding, a half hour before the ceremony, the clouds retreated. The sky turned unfathomably blue. My sister walked me down the aisle, and the rabbi read a quote from the Book of Zohar, which says that when a parent has died God personally invites him or her under the chuppah, the wedding canopy.

  I’ve never felt my parents’ presence as strongly as I did that day. I’m certain they were with us, under the chuppah, on the green hill overlooking the lake.

  It doesn’t mean that I’m over their deaths, that I will ever get over them. In some ways I’m still that girl crying on the subway platform or in the hospital bathroom; I’m still the girl who has a brick in her chest every time she sees a daughter shopping with her mother in Bloomingdale’s and whenever she walks by Wendy’s. And at the same time I am grateful that I had my parents as long as I did, and that I can keep them alive in a dream, at a wedding, in a story.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thank you to my amazing agent, Emily van Beek, and my wonderful editor, Alexandra Cooper, for giving this book a new life. I’m grateful to the fantastic team at Harper: Rosemary Brosnan, Kate Engbring, Erin Fitzsimmons, Victor Hendrickson, Kate Morgan Jackson, Alyssa Miele, Kim VandeWater, Lauren Kostenberger, Olivia Russo, Andrea Pappenheimer and the Sales team, Susan Katz, and Suzanne Murphy. Thanks to Thomas Burden, the artist behind this cover and the cover of Kissing in America.

  Thank you also to the magazine editors who were willing to pick a new writer out of the slush pile, and who first published parts of this book: C. Michael Curtis at the Atlantic; Ben Schrank, Darcy Jacobs, Melanie Manarino, and Tamara Glenny at Seventeen; Linda Davies and Susan Burmeister-Brown at Glimmer Train Stories; R. T. Smith at Shenandoah; and Alan Davis and Michael White at American Fiction. I’m grateful to the people who read early drafts, especially Anna Sabat, Allison Moore, and Becky Hagenston, and the students and faculty of the MFA program at the University of Arizona. Thank you to Allison Amend, Dalia Azim, Judy Blundell, Edward Carey, Elizabeth Everett, Carrie Fountain, Deborah Heiligman, Devon Holmes, Marthe Jocelyn, Sheri Joseph, Dika Lam, April Lurie, Elizabeth McCracken, Helen Reid, Rebecca Stead, Hannah Tinti, Cecilia Ward, Lara Wilson, and Jennifer Ziegler for all their support and encouragement. A special thank-you to Jodi Keller, and to everyone at the MacDowell Colony for providing the time and space to work on this book.

  I owe a huge debt of gratitude to my sister, Jackie, who is such a part of these pages, and to my husband, Marshall Reid, for taking my broken heart and putting it back together again.

  AN EXCERPT FROM KISSING IN AMERICA

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  I hope your first kiss went a little better than mine did

  According to my mother, my first kiss happened on a Saturday in July. The weather: steamy, blacktop-melting, jungle-gym-scorching New York City sunshine. The setting: the 49th Street playground in Queens, good on the sand quotient, low on the rats. The kisser: Hector Driggs, cute but a little bit smelly, like wet blankets and aged cheese. The event: one sopping, clammy-lipped, deranged, lunging kiss, directly on my lips.

  I bit him.

  I was three.

  A mark bloomed on his arm like two tiny purple smiles and he cried for half an hour, but my mother felt no pity for him. In fact, she swelled with pride. “Even at that young age I knew you understood the need for girls and women to fight for our freedom, equality, and personal space,” she said when she retold the story. “Plus, he smelled weird. I would’ve bit him too.”

  My mom is a professor of women’s studies at Queens College. While other newborns were happily drifting to sleep to Goodnight Moon, my mom read to me in my crib from Simone de Beauvoir, Virginia Woolf, and Audre Lorde. In our living room there’s a picture of me in my stroller at a women’s rights march in Washington, clutching a sign with my tiny green mittens: Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History!

  And so, two years ago, when I was fourteen and began what my mom termed “your ultimate rebellion,” she said I chose the worst thing possible. She would’ve preferred odd piercings, full-body tattoos, or even shoplifting to what I did.

  I fell in love with romance novels.

  It wasn’t even just regular book-love. I was crazy for them, head-over-heels, obsessed. I read them in grocery aisles, on subways, buses, between classes, and most often, curled up in bed. Over the next two years I read one hundred and eighteen of them. (Not counting those I read twice.)

  I’d discovered my first romance novel on the shelves of my best friend Annie Kim’s apartment—she has two older sisters. Jenny, her middle sister, saw me gazing at the array of colorful spines and handed me Cowboys on Fire (book 1), with bare-chested cowboy Destry and gold-belt-buckled cowboy Ewing on the cover. (I’d get to know Destry and Ewing with a passion that bordered on the scientific.) “Here,” Jenny said. “You have to read this.”

  Slowly, my room became plastered with posters of Destry and Ewing on horseback, riding bulls one-handed, and roping calves; of Sir Richard from Torrid Tomorrow, who led a double life as the pirate Diablo; and Gurlag, who was raised by wolves and known as The Wilderness Rogue.

  My mom would come into my room and gaze at the books on my night table, at Ewing on his bronco or Gurlag swinging from a tree, and she’d sigh. “I didn’t raise you to worship imbecilic apes.”

  Other times she’d grow more serious, looking at my books. “I’ve failed you as a mother, as a woman, and as a citizen of this world,” she’d say.

  It wasn’t true. I called myself a feminist (to her at least—to my friends it would be like calling myself a maiden or some other dusty crusty ancient word). At school I was quick to point out whenever boys dominated class discussions, or girls were excluded from handball games. When a flasher was spotted in our schoolyard three times in one month, I organized a Take Back the Yard march, with forty-five eighth graders parading around the Intermediate School 125 grounds chanting, “Girls on guard! Take back the yard! And dude, put some clothes on!” The flasher was undeterred, but eventually caught and prosecuted.

  Still, my books kept bothering my mother. “That happiness only comes from romantic love is the biggest myth of our society,” she told me once. “They’re selling you a fantasy version of love. It’s dishonest. Misleading. And untrue. Real love is a mess. Complicated. Not like this.” She picked up Torrid Tomorrow.

  “But you haven’t even read it.”

  As if possessed by a magic maternal sixth sense, she turned to the worst sentences in the whole book.

  Sir Richard’s chest sparkled with man-dew as he whispered, “Lilith, it may hurt you when I burst thy womanhood.”

  “Hurt me,” Lilith breathed. Her rosy domes undulated like the sea as he joined her in a love that vanquished every sorrow known on Earth.

  “The rest of the book is filled with a historical portrait of late-nineteenth-century American society, and Lilith is treated as an equal in the relationship—she’s at the forefront of the suffrage movement,” I pointed out, but my mom ignored my explanations and tried to get me to read Girls Be Strong: A Guide for Growing Up Powerful instead.

  Girls Be Strong wasn’t a bad book. It had some semi-interesting advice about how a boy stealing your scarf may mean that he likes you, but you’re still entitled to tell him to get the hell out of your way. And it included a funny piece by Gloria Steinem called “If Men Could Menstruate,” which said: “Guys would brag (‘I’m a three-pad man’) or answer praise from a buddy (‘Man, you lookin’ good!’) by giving fives and saying, ‘Yeah man, I’m on the rag!’”

  But it wasn’t exactly a romantic book, either.

  To my mother, my real problem was that I believed in love, in great love. I had this trickle of hope, always, that the future would be filled with romance. I didn’t expect to meet a Sir Richard or a Destry exactly, but it didn’t seem entirely impossible.

  My mom says that the events of last summer all started b
ecause of those one hundred and eighteen romance novels percolating in my brain. I don’t think so, though. I think everything started when I met Will and told him about my father.

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  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  PHOTO BY JACKIE RABB

  MARGO RABB is an acclaimed novelist whose debut, Cures for Heartbreak, was hailed by critics and young readers alike. Her second novel, Kissing in America, was published to equal praise, receiving four starred reviews. Her essays and short stories have appeared in the New York Times, the Atlantic, Salon, Marie Claire, the Rumpus, Zoetrope: All-Story, Seventeen, Best New American Voices, New Stories from the South, and One Story, and have been broadcast on NPR. She received the grand prize in the Zoetrope short story contest, first prize in the Atlantic fiction contest, and a PEN Syndicated Fiction Project Award. Margo grew up in Queens, New York, and has lived in Texas, Arizona, and the Midwest; she now lives outside Philadelphia with her husband and two children. You can visit her online at www.margorabb.com.

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  PRAISE FOR CURES FOR HEARTBREAK

  A Kirkus Reviews Best Book for Young Adults

  An ALA Booklist Editors’ Choice

  A Book Sense Children’s Pick

  An Association of Jewish Libraries Notable Book

  A New York Public Library Book for the Teen Age

  A TAYSHAS High School Reading List Selection

  A Capitol Choices Noteworthy Book

  ★ “Rabb leavens impossible heartbreak with surprising humor, delivered with a comedian’s timing and dark absurdity. Rabb is an exceptionally gifted writer. Readers will cherish this powerful debut.”

  —ALA Booklist (starred review)

  ★ “Black humor, pitch-perfect detail, and compelling characters make this a terrific read. As Mia struggles to make sense of her mother’s death and her father’s illness, she also sees humor in everyday situations, and her irreverent commentary brings the story to life.”

  —School Library Journal (starred review)

  ★ “This is undeniably a book of anguish; it’s also one of raw strength and casual, clever humor in random and surprising places, making it a compelling as well as tearful read.”

  —BCCB (starred review)

  ★ “When the last page turns, four new and fascinating people have been born into the reader’s consciousness.”

  —KLIATT (starred review)

  “Everybody, regardless of age, should read this novel—witty, warm, and gorgeous in its fearlessness.”

  —The Philadelphia Inquirer

  “Told in the first person with humor and tears, Mia’s voice is authentic, and her story of family tragedy and healing rings true. Touching and tender.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “Anyone who has grieved the loss of a loved one will feel an immediate connection to Mia, the narrator of this intimate novel. It gives readers a keenly insightful study of grief.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “This novel gets at the blinding ache of grief, while also managing to be very funny, very smart, and addictively readable. This is truly a gorgeous and important book, one I’ve been pressing onto friends and their teenaged kids.”

  —Cookie magazine

  “Rabb concentrates not on the brooding and self-pity that can often permeate this type of novel but on an examination of death’s antithesis—love—as it touches the lives of her father, her mother and even Mia herself. Each chapter collides and colludes to offer both the familiar and the uncharted with humorous and touching detail, breaking and mending the reader’s heart in turns.”

  —teenreads.com

  “Intense, poignant but also very funny, Mia’s story of the year following her mother’s death explores the nature of grief as it is experienced by a Jewish teenager, her older sister, and her father. There is much pain in the story but also much wisdom, not to mention a smart look at school, friendship, and romance.”

  —Association of Jewish Libraries

  “Mia’s full of conflicting emotions that are expressed in sometimes humorous ways. She wonders whether it’s OK to date shortly after her mom dies; is it OK to wear her mom’s clothes; return to school—and how to feel normal when nothing feels normal anymore. It’s an experience that will help people understand grieving and know there is recovery.”

  —Detroit Free Press

  “A powerful debut with unforgettable characters and important things to tell us about family, history, death, love, and philosophy. It’s a story that will heal your own heart.”

  —jbooks.com

  “In a wry, introspective first-person narrative (sections of which were previously published as short stories), Mia examines the ripple effects of this tragedy, showing how grief and loss infiltrate her life. An artful mix of the poignant and the sometimes comically mundane.”

  —The Horn Book

  “Humor carries this novel, preventing it from being maudlin. Reminiscent of Mexican milagros, those small religious charms nailed on sacred objects to denote miracles, it is through a series of seemingly small experiences that a shattered heart is miraculously mended.”

  —Ingram Library Services

  “A witty, matter-of-fact, and heartfelt look at what grief means to one teenager, and how the relationships and habits Mia acquires help her to accept change. The light, everyday comedy born of a series of disasters prevents the book from becoming maudlin. Peripheral characters are delightfully, even frighteningly, real in their details.”

  —VOYA

  “If you go to Amazon and limit your search to children’s books and type in cancer, you’ll get more than 4,000 book titles. With the field so packed with already published books, I thought it would be unlikely for a new book on the subject to be a MUST READ. And now I’m recommending this with all my heart, for teens and adults.”

  —Marianas Variety

  “Cures for Heartbreak is a sad, funny, smart, endlessly poignant novel. Reading it made me feel grateful for my life, for my family, and above all for the world that brings us gifts like the gift of Margo Rabb.”

  —Michael Chabon, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

  “Margo Rabb’s story beautifully brings together the intensely personal and the historical, and rings with the authenticity of a bitter, yet illuminating truth.”

  —Joyce Carol Oates

  “Cures for Heartbreak is full of sadness, humor, and quirky details that ring completely true. I thoroughly enjoyed it.”

  —Curtis Sittenfeld, author of Prep and Sisterland

  PRAISE FOR KISSING IN AMERICA

  A 2016 ALA Booklist Best Fiction for Young Adults Book

  An Amazon Best Book of the Month

  A Junior Library Guild Selection

  2016 Amelia Bloomer List

  A 2015 New York Public Library Best Book for Teens

  A Chicago Public Library Best Teen Fiction of 2015 Book

  An O Magazine Summer Reading List Selection

  A TAYSHAS High School Reading List Selection

  ★ “Rabb eloquently gets grief right in this compassionate, perceptive, and poignant story, deftly leavened with irreverent humor, of a girl in conflict with her mother. Wise, inspiring, and ultimately uplifting—not to be missed.”

  —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

  ★ “A smart teen’s novel. [The] characters are authentic and complex. Rabb knows the perfect point to interject humor to diffuse a potentially devastating situation—a leavening of sorts to the reality that death and love inexplicitly alter the landscape of a person’s
life.”

  —ALA Booklist (starred review)

  ★ “In this indelible coming-of-age story, Rabb seamlessly weaves together multiple narratives. Sprinkled with the poetry Eva reads and writes, this story makes for a hilarious, thought-provoking, wrenching, and joyful quest.”

  —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  ★ “Exquisitely told. A well-balanced read that exposes readers to weighty ideas and difficult feelings while keeping them entertained and emotionally invested.”

  —BCCB (starred review)

  “Kissing in America is a wonderful novel about friendship, love, travel, life, hope, poetry, intelligence, and the inner lives of girls—all the things, to put it simply, that I like best in a book. Margo Rabb writes with compassion and clarity about lives that are worth telling, journeys that need to be taken, peace that needs to be reached. I loved it.”

  —Elizabeth Gilbert, New York Times bestselling author of Eat, Pray, Love

  “Wonderful. Margo Rabb has created nothing less than a women’s map of American mythologies, navigating from Emily Dickinson to Barbara Cartland, from the cowboys of the rodeos to the makeup studios of Hollywood, and from the bottom of the Atlantic to the spacious skies of the USA.”

  —E. Lockhart, New York Times bestselling author of We Were Liars

  “That Margo Rabb can write a story so gorgeous, funny, and joyous that is also unsentimental and honest is a testament to her skill and to her heart. I loved everything about Eva and the supporting cast in this beautiful novel.”

  —Sara Zarr, author of The Lucy Variations

  “It is a marvel and I love every word of it: the carefully structured plot, the memorable characters, the wholly apposite style and tone. It is funny, sad, wistful, wise, and altogether memorable.”